Page 71 of Entangled in Them

Kodee emerged from the office, Ryan close behind. “What’s wrong?”

I turned to face them both, my fingers linked on top of my head. “Rue’s not here.”

Kodee’s forehead furrowed. “What?”

“I can’t find her. She’s left.”

Ryan paled. “She’s left because of what I did to her. She didn’t want to be around me anymore.”

“No, she wouldn’t just leave.” I bit my lower lip hard enough to hurt. “She knows what that means.”

Ryan stared at me. “What it means?”

“That the Capello brothers would hold us responsible for losing her.”

“Maybe that’s where she’s gone, then,” Kodee said. “They can’t blame us for losing her if they know where she is.”

I rubbed my hand over my mouth. “Fuck. You think she’s handed herself back to them?”

“She can’t have been gone long,” Ryan said. “We were only in the office for ten or fifteen minutes. “She can’t have gone far.”

I nodded in agreement. “We need to find her.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Rue

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I WALKED THE STREETS with my hands shoved in my pockets and my head down. I had no idea where I was going, or what I was going to do. The sidewalk blurred as fresh tears filled my eyes. I always knew being with them wasn’t going to last—that it would end as quickly as it began—but now it had, the pain in my chest was almost unbearable. I wanted to go back twenty-four hours and pretend the incident with Ryan hadn’t happened, but how could I when I had the bruises around my throat to prove it? But I wasn’t going to be the one who broke the three of them up. Even though they had rules not to say it out loud, I knew they loved each other. Dillon might not want to grow up, but he’d acted recklessly by taking on a job for the Capello brothers because he wanted to help Ryan. Ryan needed Kodee and Dillon to help him through the trauma he’d experienced when he was in Iraq, and Kodee took care of both of them, even though he’d promised himself he’d never love again after losing his wife and son.

They needed each other.

They didn’t need me.

I didn’t have much choice but to go back to the Capello brothers and hand myself in. I couldn’t exist on these streets alone. I had no money, nowhere to live, and I needed protection. A tiny part of me was tempted to just let the man I’d been hiding from find me. It would all be over then. I wouldn’t have to keep fighting. I wouldn’t have to figure out how to live through the heartbreak of finally learning how it felt to have people around me who seemed to give a fuck about who I was as a person. Men who actually cared.

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